Thursday, January 30, 2014

The challenge is as follows:
When you create a new version of your PowerPivot excel file and you load it to SharePoint 2013, the Data Refresh Schedule you had configured is now gone.. As soon as there is a new version (or a new file with versions disabled) the schedule is gone and you have to re-create it.
This problem only seems to happen on SharePoint 2013, SharePoint 2010 keeps a reference to the selected schedule after updating the excel document.

The problem visual:
A Power Pivot Excel document with a Schedule enabled:

Schedule is enabled:

Make a new version & save document:

Overwrite existing file:

Check PowerPivot Data Refresh:

Gone ...

No fix yet, will update this post when I find it !

(Suggestions are welcome ..)

4 Feb Update:

I found the Microsoft KB that describes this issue (Sql Bug 1377755) in the CU6 update for SQL Server 2012:

for a working file it should spew out an escaped XML. It's your schedule that was serialized and cached here probably to speed things up. When you save the document with Excel, this value is trimmed to 255 characters, rendering it broken, so the UI (and the timerjob) thinks that the schedule is missing. This might as well be a bug in Excel.

Now we just need a solution from Microsoft :)

23 April Update:CU 9 for SQL Sever 2012 SP1 is now downloadable, let's give it a try and see if this resolves the outstanding issue...

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

When I got the question to create a proof-of-concept for exporting the number of emails in custom Microsoft-Outlook (exchange) folders, my thoughts went straight back to the period where I used a cloud solution for my team of developers because IT couldn't provide us with a Team Foundation Server.

On http://www.cloudshare.com you can create an environment with one or more VM's which you then can access via Remote Desktop (or your browser). The nice thing of this cloud solution is that they have several prepared VM's which you can "spin up" in a couple of minutes !
One of these VM's is a Microsoft Exchange 2010 SP3 environment (Exchange installed AND CONFIGURED, AD installed & configured etc.) but they have more ! :
(As per 22 January 2014)

Each of these VM's ready to spin in a couple of minutes.
The nice thing of this solution is that you can actually invite people (developers or customers) to join-in on the environment and start testing or watching what you build.
You get a free and full-functional trial period which makes things even faster. Imagine you suddenly got that invite at the biggest customer ever, you need that PowerPivot demo area for yourself and ready NOW!!
You can do it, with cloudshare.com !!

Other than RDP'ing to this environment (You'll get a local-admin account & password), you can also use "Cloud Folders' to FTP from and to the VM. This way you can actually export your code / results from the cloud to your own machine.
SnapShot's are also available, so no more re-doing all that hard work :)

Some caveats:
- In the trial period, your environment will shut-down automatically when you don't use it. When you are using it, you can "extend" the period before it goes down. This makes sure that cloudshare is not using valuable resources for nothing :P When cloudshare terminates your environment you can "spin it up" at any time again, it's right where you left it !
- You are depending on your connection to the cloud.. no internet = no environment
- Make sure you look at all pricing options, depending what you are going to do with the tool